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Musk Says Drivers May Become Obsolete, Announces Juice-Saving Upgrades
Lucas123 (935744) writes During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. [Note: compare Lyft CEO Logan Green's opposite view] 'You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine,' he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids. Related news: it may not be fully autonomous driving, but Tesla S drivers are promised an upgrade a few months from now that gives a taste, with the addition of automatic steering features. And though it's perhaps anti-climactic as a solution to "ending range anxiety," Musk also announced today that Teslas will get in the next two weeks a software upgrade that will greatly upgrade the cars' routing software, integrating "near-realtime" lists of available supercharger stations, and keeping drivers apprised of whether one is within range.
Is this something people actually want, empty marketing rhetoric, or a frightening imminent example of 'manufactured consent'?
I thought we'd have flying cars before we'd lose the chance to drive.
All kidding aside, 40 years from now we'll still be driving our own cars because programmers won't be able to help a car decide if it is allowed to avoid a collision that will kill a driver by swerving onto a sidewalk and killing two pedestrians.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
They should let owners lend their private chargers for a fee, handled by Tesla. Something like Uber but for charging your car.
If you want to accurately predict the future do as Jules Verne did and write as many of them as you can possibly think up. History indicates that you will be mostly wrong and a large number of predictions will increase the odds of getting something right.
i will drive it, thank you very much.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
First they say that drivers are obsolete; next it'll be the passengers. Then, before you know it, there's a gathering of them in car-parks and garages around the country.....
wasn't elon just recently warning us against autonomous intelligence?
jalopnik article
'"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'
As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.
Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Which may very well occur when autonomous vehicles can't decide what they should do and come to a stop, causing others to plow into them.
More likely, just like older folk that insist on hand-writing letters, having a land-line, and banking in person, you will not be forced to give up your driving. Instead, your costs will go up, while other more inexpensive or convenient options will become available for those who don't care to drive to get from A->B.
Feel free to yell at those folks from your porch to stay off your lawn as they blissfully ignore you.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
He wrote about teens jumping in front of convoys of automated big rigs a long time ago, out of sheer boredom and an innate desire to cause chaos. Even in Methuselah's Children the long lived had methods of switching off auto drive to avoid being tracked everywhere at all times. It has been pointed out previously what about people on farms driving completely off the grid, not to mention the totally unresolved issue of whose at fault when my auto drive car is involved in an accident, or the choice HAS to be made between saving MY life, the driver or some stranger on the side of the road who wants to commit suicide by being run over...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you keep your distance that won't be a problem. A properly designed autonomous vehicle will do that by default.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
.
Show me a self-driving car that could navigate the snow-choked roads of Boston this winter.
No because you see, the other autonomous vehicles will stop in time.
As for the manually driven cars plowing into them - well they do that today anyway, don't they?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Except sit at home with their tablet / laptop which is all that most people including most politicians do these days. We'll be living in a curated idiot-proof society soon, where the overlords decide what pre-packaged entertainment you're going to soak up today. All the old adventurous hobbies like driving sport cars and other vehicles, hunting and even things like doing certain DIY work on your own house are slowly being regulated out of existence to protect people from themselves.
The thing is, governments see us only as tools to keep the economy going, the economy and creating jobs are far more important than getting people to extract enjoyment out of their lives so it is in their interest to keep us as dependent on the economy as possible and since in the West we don't manufacture much anymore it also means coaxing people to use as many services as possible
and what will happen to people automated out of a job?
Go back to school and rack up big loans just to be told you are to old for the job?
End having to use the jail / prison for there doctor for the stuff that er will not cover?
Being automated out of a job is inevitable - it's been happening for decades. The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
Going back to school under those conditions is insane - why rack up debt to train for a job you'll never get?
Jail is an option some homeless people have been using for years - break a window, wait for the cops, sleep in a not-so-cold jail cell.
No, I don't have any real solutions :-( Sorry.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's dangerous talk from someone who has built his car business on a reputation for performance and quality... when cars drive themselves, they won't need to be fast, or good looking, because nobody will be looking. They could look like the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile and nobody would notice.
Oh well. Fun is always short lived.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
... that work on the new holy grail, autonomous vehicles. Somehow, the level of confidence in this new technology seems to be inversely proportional to the distance to the nitty-gritty details of actually doing this. Can someone please tell me, exactly, how this is supposed to be done? Without using the phrase "how hard can it be".
Let's take the simplest of all the detection problems. How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road? Nobody knows, because nobody has done it yet. Yes, there are prototypes that can handle some sub sets of all cases. The best I've seen handles 90% of the cases. That takes 1 MSLOC and still counting. How expensive will the last 10% be? How many hours of recorded video data does it take to verify the last 10%? The last 1%? The 90% takes a room full of TB harddisks and thousands of units parallel verification.
But yeah, how hard can it be to make a fully autonomous vehicle? I'll bet we'll have the fusion, flying car and AI analog: constantly 30 years in the future with winters interspearsed.
Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. Rural areas would be easier since there are few interactions with other cars. And they'd be able to react faster when a deer jumps in front of you. Of course, getting a heads up infrared would go a long way to avoiding deer at night. Unless it is planting or harvesting time, the odds of seeing and interacting with anything on gravel road here are practically nil. Maybe 1 vehicle for every 10 miles I drive. Computers should find that pretty easy. All you have to do is keep it between the fenceposts.
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
Is the wealthy "Libertarian" way of dictating social standards.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Universal Basic Income, funded by the recognisation that if the only things in the loop are energy and material resources that are rightfully property of everyone on planet earth, and robots manufacturered from said resources, then everyone should get a share.
By all means, have bonuses for those who like to innovate, but Luxury Automated Communism!
The idea that everyone needs to be working 40 hours a week in our modern, increasingly automated world is absurd. Productivity has done nothing but go up for forty years. Remember the dream of a world where people could pursue hobbies and have more leisure time, away from work, because we designed machines to do the hard work for us? It's basically here, but we're all operating under this crazy mentality that we should be working eight hours a day, five days a week, if not more. And you know what more free time means? More time for people to innovate and invent. There are tons of brilliant people out there with a great idea for a new product or new business, but they don't have the time to pursue it.